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The Fatal Flaw Of Executive Leadership

Published by on February 10, 2016

When you are evaluating any leader’s effectiveness you tend to look at two major categories that summarize everything else. They are the character that defines the core values of the person and the competency or skill set that they bring to the position.

Marshall Goldsmith is one of the top Executive Coaches in the market. His book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is a great read for all leaders who want to reach their maximum potential. He identifies twenty habits that can completely destroy your influence as a leader.

The amazing thing that he confirms for all of us is that the most critical problems related to executive leadership have very little to do with core industry specific competency or even the expected qualities of productive leadership.

The overwhelming majority of smart, disciplined, experienced and passionate leaders are failing in the one major area of basic people skills. They do not relate well to their superiors, peers, subordinates and sometimes even customers.

They do not listen, make negative comments about people when they are not in the room, and always tend to punish the messenger when bad news is delivered just to list a few. Almost always these potential fatal flaws are obvious to everyone but the leader who does not even see them as an issue.

An absolute necessity for any effective leader is to establish a culture within their organization where the truth can be told and they will get the feedback they need or these extremely negative blind spots will never be revealed.

Categories: Career DevelopmentCore ValuesPersonal LeadershipServant Leader

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